As you know (or might not), my experience is in newspapers and other print and online publications. Yearbooks are a bit of a mystery. I never worked on my high school yearbook staff, but being a reader — and naturally nosy — I stared for hours at the photos and read every bit of the yearbook copy, as awful as it often was. So I’m excited about advising a yearbook staff but am apprehensive about the quality of journalism that goes into many books and the realistic potential of incorporating the web and multimedia tools.

While learning about themes and design at a yearbook workshop in Dallas this weekend (and how to up the journalism quotient), I began thinking of how online journalism concepts could be incorporated into the yearbook. (No worries — I would never advocate getting rid of the physical book. Who knows if the Internet will be around in 100 years?)

User-generated content — Many yearbook staffs are already soliciting photos from students through Facebook. I could see the photos — a form of citizen journalism — displayed on a page devoted to submitted photos or throughout the book with a special tag to indicate it was a reader photo. This would be a great marketing tool and help build buzz around the yearbook. Contests could be held during the year for students to submit their best photos. This could be especially useful for small staffs. (Before the photos made it into the print yearbook, staffers would have to get the larger digital file of the photo from the submitter in person rather than take it off Facebook to preserve the quality of the photo.)

UPDATE: Christine Grazio, a rep with one of the yearbook companies, added polls and quotes to the mix of possible user-generated content. Which makes me wonder — why not have a contest or solicit first-person personal essays from students to be printed in the yearbook?

Website — A yearbook website will be more static than a news website, but it’s a necessary tool for marketing the book and gathering information from teachers, administrators and students about upcoming events and coverage ideas through tools like Google forms. Staffers could post updates on the book throughout the year and even ask students to vote on the theme and cover design to get students more involved and feel more connected to the finished product. A calendar showing which events yearbook staff plan to cover and a schedule of group and individual posed photos would not only show those outside of class how hard staffers try to cover a variety of events, but it would also help teachers, coaches and club leaders determine whether their big events are on staff radar.

Social media — Facebook and Twitter are good marketing tools for the newspaper and yearbook. And they can be useful for finding story ideas and sources. Lots of yearbooks on Twitter. It helps if one staff member has the role of social media editor to plan posts on these sites and create a social media strategy.

These are the three areas I plan to focus on this year. Hopefully my students will be able to come up with others. If you have had success bringing online journalism to the yearbook classroom, please share in the comments section or send me an email.